William H. Gass is David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities, emeritus, and the director of the International Writers Center at Washington University. Gass is the author of Omensetter’s Luck; In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories; Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife; Fiction and the Figures of Life; On Being Blue; The World Within the Word; Habitations of the Word, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; The Tunnel; and Finding a Form, a book of essays that also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Cartesian Sonata, a book of four novellas, was published in 1998; Reading Rilke, in 1999. Gass received a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. |Back|

Jack W.C. Hagstrom is the co-author, with George Bixby, of Thom Gunn: A Bibliography, 1940-1978 (Bertram Rota, 1979) and is currently working a bibliography of Merrill's works. He is a retired Professor of Pathology at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. |Back|

Timothy J. Materer is the author of several studies of Modern Literature including James Merrill's Apocalypse (Cornell University Press, 2000) and Modernist Alchemy : Poetry and the Occult (Cornell University Press, 1995). He is a Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. |Back|

J. D. McClatchy is editor of The Yale Review and the author of four books of poems: Scenes from Another Life (1981), Stars Principal (1986), The Rest of the Way (1990), and Ten Commandments (1998). His literary essays are collected in White Paper (1989) and Twenty Questions (1998).  With Stephen Yenser, he is editor of James Merrill's Collected Poems and Selected Letters (2001). |Back|

Lynne McMahon has published three collections of poetry: Faith (Wesleyan University Press 
1988), Devolution of the Nude (D.R. Godine, 1993), and The House of Entertaining Science (David R. Godine, 1999). Her essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as The New York Times Book Review, New Virginia Review, American Poetry Review, and Southern Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, APR, The Nation, Rolling Stone,The Yale Review,The New England Review, and Paris Review. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Missouri Arts Council, and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of  Missouri, Columbia. |Back|
 

Carl Phillips is the author of four books of poetry, Pastoral, From the Devotions, Cortège, and In the Blood as well as a forthcoming book of poems, The Tether.  He has received prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is director of the Creative Writing Program at Washington University in Saint Louis.  |Back|

Sherod Santos is the author of four books of poetry: The Pilot Star Elegies (W. W. Norton, 1999); The City of Women (1993); The Southern Reaches (1989); and Accidental Weather (1982). In 2000, the University of Georgia Press published A Poetry of Two Minds, a collection of his essays. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. |Back|

Stephen Yenser is the author of The Fire in All Things (Louisiana State University Press, 1993), which was selected by Richard Howard to receive the 1992 Walt Whitman Award; The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987), and Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell (1975). His poems and essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and other magazines. His honors include a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, two Fulbright teaching fellowships, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry, and the B. F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review. With J.D. McClatchy, he is the editor of James Merrill's Collected Poems and Selected Letters. He is a professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California in Los Angeles. |Back|